Rachel E. Dubrofsky is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. She is the author of
Shoshana Amielle Magnet is Associate Professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of
Rachel E. Dubrofsky is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. She is the author of
Shoshana Amielle Magnet is Associate Professor at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of
Held in the Light: Reading Images of Rihanna’s Domestic Abuse
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Published:May 2015
Using the 2009 police images documenting the domestic abuse of pop star Robyn “Rihanna” Fenty, this chapter mobilizes Denise Da Silva and Sally Engle Merry’s respective formulations of the “analytics of raciality” and “regime of domestic violence governmentality” toward a feminist reading of Rihanna’s whitened appearance on camera. The analysis of the visualization of Rihanna’s domestic abuse moves beyond mainstream media coverage to articulate visual rhetorical affinities between images of domestic abuse and earlier forms of legal institutional and domestic photography. The chapter demonstrates how the composition of such images produce battered women as racialized subjects of law.
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